l'affaire

The wedding band placed on her finger twenty years ago-- rope tied around the sapling which has grown into an oak. One day she will spontaneously decide to enter a hospital emergency room and have the ring severed from her finger. Later that night her lover will nibble, lick and kiss the indentation left by the ring at the base of her finger-- a ring itself, an anti-ring. Her lover does this to encourage her flesh to welcome back the blood it was somewhere along the line denied.

An our-mouths-the-newlywed-suite-in-a-tongue-hotel kiss.

How Karen is able to so completely fold up her body-- knees to chest, heels to hindquarters-- and strap herself together with her arms buckled snugly with her hands. She looks like one of those tri-fold ladders propped up with pillows at the head of our bed. I loosen her hands, part her arms, unfold her. This is why I consider that a lover may be a ladder laid out horizontally in bed: my lateral ascent and descent of physical affection has no end but the top of her head and the tips of her toes. In the morning I may find in the darkest, coldest corners of a closet my tri-fold ladder huddling like a frightened child.

Mid-day. Karen leaps out of bed and scurries, tip-toe, across the cold floor to answer the telephone. Her back to me, I see her curly black mane of disheveled hair, her bulky woolen sweater, and the smooth nudity of her from the waist down, and I revel in the progression of these textures.

Untended gardens, their thick intimacies.

Husbands live outside, lovers inside, women.

The husband, standing alone in the two-car garage, between his lawnmower and snowblower, turns rigid as a leaf rake.

We stand around conversing with friends on a lit porch at night, Karen between the porch-light and I. As she is back-lit I admire her silhouette, that clearly defined contour filled with the mystery which she has become. Touching her shoulder, it would appear to a third person that my arm has become the flexible bridge between lovers, belonging equally to both. It would appear that I could reach into her, enter her at any point; that I could walk right into her. I approach her as never before, and as that third person, pen this image with ink drawn from the well of our common silhouette.

Karen is reading, stilled with concentration, still as a photograph which has stopped time, trapped chance. The urge to look at photos of her taken from a time before I knew her. . . .

The mole just under the curve of her left cheek and just above the corner of her mouth when she smiles. When she is not smiling it is impossible to describe or define its precise location; I have tried, consulting facial anatomy texts for the terminology that would articulate and perhaps explain the joyful stirrings its precise placement causes me.

When your lover's name, pupa of noun, metamorphoses into other parts of speech, emerges from its chrysalis of word, unfolding a -y, an -ing, like a wing. . . . "Oh, Kareny Karen, you're Karening again!"

Her seductive pronunciation of the letter "s," her delicious hint of a lisp. She is my dream woman: Eve whose mouth houses the tongue of the serpent, who has tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Karen.

Near-by in the dark of night, her delicate snoring, which continues to purr, becomes the fluttering of love in my heart.

Isn't she especially delicious in the morning, after she's spent the night simmering in her own juices in the warm oven of the bed-covers?

Thin, subtle contour lines of Schiele's nudes-- no more perfect a rendering of the tentative boundary between two bodies, between two lovers.

Sketching Karen nude, I caress her in another dimension.